The British Royal United Services Institute [RUSI] is, in my opinion, the most honest and level-headed military assessment organization in the West. As they have pointed out recently, the Russians have been successful only in chipping away at the Ukrainian front lines, which are weak from diminished manpower and lacking multi-layered entrenched defenses, but Russian troops can’t break through in large numbers because Russia has no large brigade-size columns in reserve to do so.
The result is that Ukraine keeps losing ground in limited amounts, while inflicting fairly heavy casualties on the more numerous, but relatively inexperienced, Russian troops that Moscow keeps putting into the “meat grinder.” Here are excerpts from RUSI’s recent report on Russian strategic and tactical objectives:
Russia still maintains the strategic objective of bringing about the subjugation of Ukraine. It now believes that it is winning. Surrender terms currently being proposed by Russian intermediaries include Ukraine ceding the territory already under Russian control along with Kharkiv, and in some versions Odessa; agreeing not to join NATO; and maintaining a head of state approved by Russia. The only significant concession Russia proposes is that what is left of Ukraine can join the EU.
The process by which Russia aims to bring about this outcome is in three stages.
The first requires the continuation of pressure along the length of the Ukrainian front to drain the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) munitions and reserves of personnel. Parallel to this effort, the Russian Special Services are tasked with breaking the resolve of Ukraine’s international partners to continue to provide military aid. Once military aid has been significantly limited such that Ukrainian munition stocks become depleted, Russia intends to initiate further offensive operations to make significant – if slow – gains on the battlefield. These gains are then intended to be used as leverage against Kyiv to force capitulation on Russian terms.
It is vital to appreciate that Russian goals may expand with success,.. there is no assurance that even if Russia got what it wanted out of negotiations it would not subsequently endeavour to physically occupy the rest of Ukraine or be emboldened to use force elsewhere.
Russian Military Capacity
The Russian military began 2023 with a highly disorganised force in Ukraine comprising approximately 360,000 troops. By the beginning of the Ukrainian offensive in June 2023, this had risen to 410,000 troops and was becoming more organised. Over the summer of 2023, Russia established training regiments along the border and in the occupied territories and, following the mutiny of Wagner forces, endeavoured to standardise its units, breaking down the previous trend towards private armies. By the beginning of 2024, the Russian Operational Group of Forces in the occupied territories comprised 470,000 troops.
While Russian force quality is unlikely to increase so long as the Ukrainians can maintain a significant level of attrition across the force, the Russians will be able to maintain a steady tempo of attacks throughout 2024
Battalions are organised as line and storm battalions, and tend to operate in company groups which fight in small, dispersed detachments. This reflects not only adaptation to battlefield conditions, but also the shortage of trained officers able to coordinate larger formations, with a significant proportion of Russian junior officers currently being promoted from the ranks and receiving condensed officer training, sometimes as short as two months long.
The Russian Group of Forces continues to take significant casualties, but is nevertheless growing in size. Operating at greater scale allows the Russian military to take measures that guarantee the integrity of the front line… While no large-scale offensive is currently taking place, Russian units are tasked with conducting smaller tactical attacks that at minimum inflict steady losses on Ukraine and allow Russian forces to seize and hold positions.
In this way, the Russians are maintaining a consistent pressure on a number of points. Although the Russian military’s aspiration to increase in size to 1.5 million personnel has not been realised, recruiters are currently achieving almost 85% of their assigned targets for contracting troops to fight in Ukraine. The Kremlin therefore believes that it can sustain the current rate of attrition through 2025. [But a larger and larger proportion are coming from foreign troops, including NK.]
The overall assessment is that while Russian force quality is unlikely to increase so long as the AFU can maintain a significant level of attrition across the force, the Russians will be able to maintain a steady tempo of attacks throughout 2024.
Russian Industrial Capacity
In terms of Russian industry’s capacity to support ongoing operations, Russia has significantly mobilised its defence industry, increasing shifts and expanding production lines at existing facilities as well as bringing previously mothballed plants back online. This has led to significant increases in production output. For example, Russia is delivering approximately 1,500 tanks to its forces per year along with approximately 3,000 armoured fighting vehicles of various types. Russian missile production has similarly increased.
Despite these achievements, Russia faces significant limitations in the longevity and reliability of its industrial output. Of the tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, for example, approximately 80% are not new production but are instead refurbished and modernised from Russian war stocks. The number of systems held in storage means that while Russia can maintain a consistent output through 2024, it will begin to find that vehicles require deeper refurbishment through 2025, and by 2026 it will have exhausted most of the available stocks. As the number of refurbished vehicles goes down, industrial capacity can go into making new platforms, but this will necessarily mean a significant decrease in vehicles delivered to the military.
Another vulnerability for Russia’s complex weapons like missiles is the extensive dependence on Western-sourced components. Although Russia has maintained a steady supply of the necessary components owing to the incoherent and lackadaisical approach to sanctions adopted by Western states, a more coherent approach to countering the Russian defence industry could disrupt supply lines. Even with the existing flawed approach, the cost of components has risen by 30% for the Russian defence sector, and it has only managed to stabilise supplies rather than expand them, despite extra investment in this line of effort.
Perhaps the most serious limitation for Russia, however, is ammunition manufacture. In order to achieve its aspiration to make significant territorial gains in 2025, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has assessed an industrial requirement to manufacture or source approximately 4 million 152mm and 1.6 million 122mm artillery shells in 2024… the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in subsequent years, unless new factories are set up and raw material extraction is invested in with a lead time beyond five years.
This means that to properly resource the armed forces, Russia must – in the short term – further draw down its remaining 3 million rounds of stored ammunition, though much of this is in poor condition. To further compensate for shortages, Russia has signed supply and production contracts with Belarus, Iran, North Korea and Syria, with the latter only able to provide forged shell casings rather than complete shells. Although the injection of around 2 million 122mm rounds from North Korea [with their high defect rate] will help Russia in 2024, it will not compensate for a significant shortfall in available 152mm munitions in 2025.
Conclusions
The Russian theory of victory is plausible if Ukraine’s international partners fail to properly resource the AFU. Beyond 2026, attrition of systems will begin to materially degrade Russian combat power, while Russian industry could be disrupted sufficiently by that point, making Russia’s prospects decline over time. The latter would require Ukraine’s partners to demonstrate a semblance of competence in their measures aimed at countering Russian defence mobilisation, which remains eminently possible in spite of their performance to date.
What RUSI is saying is that even though Russia is larger in size with a more numerous population, and a larger but older industrial output, corruption is still very real in the old continuing Soviet state and it cannot continue the war indefinitely if the West is determined to keep Ukraine armed with long-range weapons to degrade the Russia military and oil producing infrastructure.
And just as pro-Russian analysts like Scott Ritter and Doug MacGregor overestimated Russia’s conventional military at the beginning of the war, there is also doubt about the viability of Russia’s huge nuclear arsenal—especially about whether they have done the necessary maintenance and refurbishing that all nuclear weapons require.